Software licensing inefficiency in the datacenter

The overprovisioning of servers in data centers is rife and 15% are not actively used has led to inefficient use of hardware. On top of that there’s software license waste through unused and partially used applications on organizations’ servers. Anecdotal evidence echoes analysts’ opinions that the total cost of licensing and running servers could be as much as 80-90% of total software spend.

Businesses buy $billions’ worth of enterprise applications such as ERP, CRM, finance systems and many more. This includes an enormous outlay on the cost of the infrastructure software that enables virtualization. Many of these applications have different and complex licensing rules. It is important to understand actual usage and whether, for example, a premium license could be replaced by a standard one or even cancelled if it’s not used.

There are many different models of licensing for example, per CPU, per RAM, per user. Sometimes this complexity is so complicated that organizations tend to overprovision as they can’t understand what they need to do. So no one truly understands how to be truly efficient or feels comfortable that they have exactly the right number of licenses and getting true business value.